Tag Archive for '3d printing'

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Now that I’ve recovered from Maker Faire, I can continue documenting what I did. In the lead up to the event, I tried to streamline the FaceCube project as much as possible so visitors wouldn’t have to waste precious Faire time waiting for a print to start. On the hardware side, I kept the extruder and heated bed warmed up to operating temperature and (literally) hot swapped 4″x4″ pieces of glass so that prints could run back to back. I updated the FaceCube script to do capture, cleaning, meshing, scaling, and running through OpenSCAD with a single button press. The remaining bottleneck was running Skeinforge on my geriatric in computer years laptop. Skeinforge is an amazing utility, but written in Python, it is slower than a drunk sloth.

There are ways of speeding up drunk sloths though. Psyco is commonly recommended, but does not support 64 bit architectures. My roommate Will came up with a plan to run a Skeinforge server on PyPy on a faster computer and have a client on my laptop send STLs to it for skeining. We ran out of time on that, but we did get PyPy running normal Skeinforge on my laptop. As of PyPy 1.5, there is support for Tkinter. Following those instructions to install PyPy and Tkinter and run Skeinforge on 64 bit Linux:

The fonts may look slightly different, but the application should behave the same. Export times should decrease the first couple of times you put a file through as the JIT compiler optimizes and then stay good as long as you keep the process running. On my laptop with a 2.00 GHz Core 2 Duo, Skeinforge runs 2 to 3 times faster on PyPy than on stock CPython 2.6.6. The tested objects were a Weighted Storage Cube, a Flower, Whistle v2, and the Prusa Mendel vertex.

Brookelynn and Nat from Make did a video on the project I’ll be bringing to Maker Faire Bay Area this year. It is amazing what good videography and editing can do for a project video. Also amazing: YouTube comments.

We’ve seen a seemingly endless array of amazing Kinect hacks over the last few months, from superhero generators to obstacle avoiding quadcopters. However, it was only a matter of time before someone came up with a hack so inane and irrelevant that it would bring shame to the entire hobby. That time is now, and that someone is me. I bring to you, gestural 3D printing! Using the Kinect to track your hand, you can draw one layer at a time, with the printer following your every move. Pushing forward extrudes plastic, while pulling your hand back will start a new layer. Who needs difficult and confusing CAD software when you can just directly draw the object you want to print?

Really though, you can only get through 4 or 5 layers before your arm feels like it’s going to fall off, and the resulting object will look like a stringy blob of plastic vomit. The source is in the FaceCube GitHub repository. I don’t recommend actually using it, but if for some reason you want to, the dependencies are mindbogglingly complex. You’ll need to install OpenNI and NITE to start with; this guide at Keyboardmods is helpful. You’ll also need my branch of OSCeleton, which improves on hand tracking. With the Kinect hooked up, you can run ./osceleton -n -f to start hand tracking in an Open Sound Control server. You can then run the gestureprinter.py script, which requires pyOSC, pygame, and the RepRapArduinoSerialSender script from Skeinforge, which is also in the FaceCube repository. Of course, you’ll also need both a Kinect and a 3D printer that is compatible with the Gcode that RepRap firmwares use. The script is set up for my printer specifically, but it should be straightforward to tweak for others if you dare.

This project is a tangent off of something cool I’ve been hacking on in small pieces over the last few months. I probably would not have gone down this tangent had it not been for the recent publication of Fabricate Yourself. Nothing irks inspires me more than when someone does something cool and then releases only a description and pictures of it. Thus, I’ve written FaceCube, my own open source take on automatic creation of solid models of real life objects using the libfreenect python wrapper, pygame, NumPy, MeshLab, and OpenSCAD.

The process is currently multi-step, but I hope to have it down to one button press in the future. First, run facecube.py, which brings up a psychedelic preview image showing the closest 10 cm of stuff to the Kinect. Use the up and down arrow keys to adjust that distance threshold. Pressing spacebar toggles pausing capture to make it easier to pick objects. Click on an object in the preview to segment it out. Everything else will disappear; clicking elsewhere will clear the choice. You can still use the arrow keys while it is paused and segmented to adjust the depth of what you want to capture. You can also use the H and G keys to adjust hole filling to smooth out noise and fill small holes in the object. If the object is intended to have holes in it, press D to enable donut mode, which leaves the holes open. Once you are satisfied, you can press P to take a screenshot or S to save the object as a PLY format point cloud.

You can then open the PLY file in MeshLab to turn it into a solid STL. I followed a guide to figure out how to do that and created a filter script attached below. To use it, click Filters -> Show current filter script, click Open Script, choose meshing.mlx, and click Apply Script. You may have to click in the preview, but after a few seconds, it will say that it Successfully created a mesh. You can click Render -> Render Mode -> Flat Lines to see what it looks like. You can then click File -> Save As, and save it as an STL. You can probably get better results if you manually pick the right filters for your object, but this script will be enough most of the time.

You can then open the STL in OpenSCAD or Blender and scale it and modify to your heart’s (or printer’s) content. Of course, the real magic comes from when you take advantage of all that OpenSCAD has to offer. Make a copy of yourself frozen in carbonite, put your face on a gear, or make paper weights shaped like your foot. This is also where the name FaceCube comes from. My original goal going into this, I think at my roommate’s suggestion, was to create ice cube trays in the shapes of people’s faces. This can be done very easily in OpenSCAD, involving just subtracting the face object from a cube.

Since all of the cool kids are apparently doing it, I’ve put this stuff into a GitHub repository. Go ahead and check it out, err… git clone it out. The facecube.py script requires the libfreenect from the unstable branch and any recent version of pygame, numpy, and scipy. You’ll need any recent version of MeshLab or Blender after that to do the meshing. I’ve been using this on Ubuntu 10.10, but it should work without much trouble on Windows or OS X. The latest code will be on git, but if you are averse to it for whatever reason, I’ve attached the script and the meshlab filter script below. Since Thingiverse is the place for this sort of thing, I’ve also posted it along with some sample objects as thing:6839.

One of the unpleasant surprises you come across when first learning how to operate a RepRap is that any object longer than an inch or so in any dimension printed in ABS will warp quite a lot as the lower layers cool. The workaround, other than switching to another plastic, is to print onto a heated build platform. There a few varieties available to buy, but I decided to build one out of parts I could get at Halted. I found a ~2mm thick sheet of aluminum in roughly the correct dimensions with holes predrilled for $2, and a few 50 watt resistors for about $2 each.

My primary design goal was to avoid putting more load on my (fused) RAMPS board and mini-ATX power supply by directly powering the bed off of AC. As a purely resistive load, this is also by far the most efficient way of doing it. I connected the resistors in series with 16 gauge high temperature teflon insulated wire and JB-Welded them to the sheet. I also used JB-Weld to mount a thermistor near the middle resistor to get temperature readings. I then mounted the board on springs above the normal build platform and covered the surface with Kapton tape. The relay is being switched by one of the MOSFETs on the RAMPS board. A red LED indicates that the relay is powered, and there is a flyback diode across the relay coil. The Arduino Mega was resetting randomly partway through prints until I added a decoupling capacitor in parallel to the coil as well.

Overall, it works well. With roughly 80 watts of power, it heats up to 110C in around 5 minutes, which is sufficient for ABS. I managed to print a 150mm long object with no warping. I’ve also been using it with PLA at 60C. Right now it poses a mild electrocution hazard sitting on my desk, but I plan on printing out an enclosure for it as soon as I figure out how to use OpenSCAD.